Equity ownership and performance

Corporate governance has been at the center of interest in the corporate- nance literature for the past decade. The discussion has continuously int- si? ed due to the occurrence of multiple corporate governance failures which have triggered the introduction or further re? nement of national and inter- tional corporate governance codes. The necessity of regulatory action however rests on the need for a sound understanding of potentially negative e? ects of ownership structure on ? nancial performance. Unfortunately, the empirical literature so far has not delivered consistent evidence leaving the overall e? ects still somewhat in the open. This incons- tency is argued to stem from di? erent biases in the statistical analysis, where the most important ones are the endogeneity and simultaneity bias. The - jective of this dissertation is to provide less distorted results by modelling various ownership aspects and performance simultaneously. The study sets out with a simultaneous equations analysis of the re- tionship between general ownership concentration and performance. This is followed by an examination of more speci? c ownership e? ects with a foll- up model focusing on managerial ownership and another one on institutional ownership. Subsequently, the author combines the three previous models in a ? nal comprehensive analysis which allows for the simultaneous assessment and separation of the di? erent ownership and performance e? ects. Withitsstate-of-the-artanalysis, thedissertationcontributessubstantially to the existing international empirical literature on the relationship between corporate ownership and performance. I wish for this dissertation to give impetus to and become widely accepted by corporate governance researchers and practitioners alike.